5 Badass Con Men Who Fooled the Experts There to Catch Them

Con artists exist because the world is full of stupid and/or gullible people who believe everything they hear. That's why the world also needs experts, people who are paid a lot of money to sort reality from bullshit. And we like to think they do a good job, otherwise museums would be full of pictures of dicks signed "Leonardo Da Vinci" in crayon.

But then occasionally some con artist slips through the cracks and manages to make a living selling bullshit to the exact people who should be most qualified to call it out, and suddenly you find yourself wondering if we're all just waiting to be suckers.

In 2003, catching terrorists was right at the top of the government's to-do list, thanks to a certain obscure incident that had recently happened in New York. The U.S. government was pretty jumpy about the whole thing and was enthusiastic about any new technology that might help them stop any future tragedies before they happened.

DHSThey handed out rainbow awareness ribbons so we could each make a difference.

Enter Dennis Montgomery, a computer programmer from California. He developed software that he claimed could decode messages broadcast by the Arab television network Al-Jazeera. He said he'd found them to contain coordinates and flight numbers used for planning terrorist attacks. Having learned from Hollywood that there's nothing you can't do with a computer, the Department of Homeland Security decided they'd take it and promptly handed over $20 million. That's quite a bit of money, considering Montgomery was pulling these secret messages out of his ass.

Flights were grounded all over the world on Christmas in 2003 after officials were warned by Montgomery's software that a terror attack was imminent. French authorities detained six people in connection with the supposed plot, then let all six go because they weren't terrorists at all. Frustrated, the French intelligence agency decided to test the software themselves, finding it to be "merde de cheval complete," or "total horseshit." The CIA agreed with this assessment and told the DHS what a bunch of morons they were, presumably with a comical slap across the back of the head.

You'd probably assume Montgomery was fired and locked up in Guantanamo Bay for his deception, right? Of course not. He kept working for various government agencies for years, and in 2009 he was awarded a $3 million contract with the Air Force. At the end of that year, Montgomery was charged with passing bad checks at casinos in Vegas, at which point the intelligence services finally decided they should probably stop giving him money.

#4. A Make-Believe Forensic Investigator Fools the British Courts for Years

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Forensic investigation has got itself a pretty glamorous reputation, even though everything about its TV portrayal is nonsense. It's easy to see why someone might fancy a bit of laser-and-microscope action, so in many ways Gene Morrison was ahead of the curve. He decided in 1977 that dusting and swabbing was the life for him, so he set his sights on several years of hard study to gain the expertise necessary. Just kidding -- he bought a sham degree through the mail and began his own forensic investigation firm with no more qualification than what you can get from a pulp crime novel. Apparently no one bothered to check if his credentials were genuine or even whether the university they came from existed, because Morrison started calling himself "doctor," and that was good enough for the U.K. justice system. Thankfully, he only got away with this for ... let's see here ... 26 fucking years.

Chelsea Lauren/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty ImagesEven Dre managed just 20 years before his medical credentials were questioned.

Yep -- for the next two and a half decades, Morrison hired himself out to private and public clients, earning 250,000 pounds from U.K. taxpayers in the process. He testified in 700 trials, so that's several hundred lawyers who failed to spend five minutes figuring out that the witness was Mr. Liar McLiarpants. Sorry, that's Dr. McLiarpants.

Authorities had to reassess every case that Morrison had ever testified in to ensure that nobody had been convicted on his evidence, which in many cases was cut and pasted directly from the Internet. In the end, he was convicted on 22 charges related to perjury and fraud, although he insisted on being called "doctor" throughout his own trial.

It's not clear what it was about Morrison that had police, judges, and juries convinced of his worth for so long. Perhaps he changed the font when he copied and pasted a bunch of his reports from the Internet? A transcript of a police interview in 2007, after Morrison was caught out, suggests it is perhaps his ability to hold together a coherent tale with unbridled panache. For example, when asked where in America he'd studied for his degree, he came back with "Er, crikey, I can't remember."

#3. A Man Carves Fake Artifacts in His Shed, Sells Them to Museums

The entire point of a museum is that it's full of people who know their shit -- the tourists may think they're just looking at a picture of some flowers in a swamp, but the museum knows it's a Monet. That's the whole reason museums exist. So you wouldn't think that somebody would be able to, say, make some bullshit in their garage and pass it off to museums as real priceless works of art. And you certainly wouldn't think the museums would fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars for said bullshit year after year. But you'd be wrong.

Comstock Images/Stockbyte/Getty So, you're ignorant either way.

British artist Shaun Greenhalgh was having a hard time selling his work. He was reasonably talented, but damn it, reasonable talent doesn't get you nearly as far as, say, crime. So, Greenhalgh embarked on a career of creating and selling fake artifacts. After roping his father, George, into the scam, Greenhalgh tried to sell museums a "small silver object" inscribed with Old English and claimed it contained a piece of the true cross of Jesus. Experts at the British Museum and English Heritage realized the silver box was a fake, but thought the wood might be real, since claiming to possess a genuine artifact of the Crucifixion isn't suspicious even if you hand it over in an obviously forged container. George Greenhalgh sold the piece for 100 pounds. Then he sold another piece. He kept doing this for almost two fucking decades without being caught.

Greenhalgh produced fake paintings and sculptures, from copies of ancient artifacts to works by famous artists such as L.S. Lowry and Barbara Hepworth. His other pieces included a Roman plate, golden statuettes, and a Victorian vase. His father would claim that they were all heirlooms that he had found magically laying around the house, as though finding a seemingly infinite number of priceless relics under a sheet in your attic is completely normal. And museums and historians kept ruling them genuine.

BBCOther pieces allegedly "fell off the back of a truck," explaining their ruined state.

Their most successful con was an Egyptian statuette called the Amarna Princess, which they sold to Bolton Museum in 2003 for 440,000 pounds. Ironically, the museum thought they were tricking the Greenhalghs by shelling out much less money than the ancient statue was worth. In reality, the statuette had been carved in just a few weeks and made to look old using tea and clay.

The Art NewspaperThe head's missing because the elder Greenhalgh got angry and hungry seeing all the tea gone.

"Rubbing it in tea" is a method of faking age that has been practiced and perfected by 8-year-olds making pirate maps over many decades, so it's easy to understand why it would convince antiques experts. In the end, the Greenhalghs were caught when an ancient Assyrian relief they were hocking turned out to have a spelling mistake. When the experts decided to maybe take a second look at some of these artifacts, the whole long career of forgery began to unravel ... but not before the Greenhalghs made over $1.35 million.